This page includes the assignment sheet for the third critical essay. My goal is to make this page as useful to you as possible, so let me know if it can be improved. If anything is badly worded, unclear, or missing, please contact me with constructive criticisms and suggestions. Thanks.

Assignment Sheet

Due: no later than 5 pm on Friday, April 22, 2005, either in my mailbox in the English department main office (Fenton 277), or in the envelope on the bulletin board outside my office door (Fenton 240).

Format: 5-8 pages, double spaced, with reasonable fonts, font sizes, and margins (be warned that barely getting on to the fifth sheet of paper does not a five-page paper make!); title that indicates main argument of paper; heading that includes your name, the course name or number, and the date; format, bibliography, and citations in MLA style (see the links page for explanations and examples of MLA style; the basic template is Author. "Title of Poem, or Essay, or Story." Title of Book from which It Comes. Editor of Book (if any), ed. Place of Publication: Publisher, Date of Publication. Page Numbers.); proper quotation format in body of paper: "..." (McHugh 18). for quotations within a paragraph; blockquote format for quotations five lines or longer.

Criteria for Evaluation: Your grade for the critical essay will be determined by the coherence and validity of the paper's arguments, the effectiveness of the paper's structure in conveying your ideas and convincing your audience, and the quality of the paper's prose (including grammar, syntax, formatting, and punctuation).

Audience: In general, think of your immediate audience as those who have taken and are taking this class; hence, you can assume that your readers have read the texts you're writing on and you don't have to include the kind of background that someone not taking this course would need.

Draft Policy: I would be happy to offer brief comments on your drafts, so long as you get me them by April 14.

Rewrite Policy: I will not grade rewrites of the critical essay, although I will give comments on any rewrite(s) you choose to do (which will improve your preparation/participation grade). For extra credit, simply do more than one critical essay: it will improve your preparation/participation grade, plus your lowest critical essay grade(s) will be dropped.

Options: Here are your options for the third critical essay. In each of these options, your job is to come up with an argument that you are trying to support by using textual evidence to persuade your readers of your interpretation's validity. Unless you have already turned in a critical essay, you will not have the option of choosing your own topic/question for this essay; instead, you must choose one of the following topics and use at least one of the works we've read from the "Pasts and Futures" unit in developing your response to it.

How and to what ends do the writers (any combination of them) that we've read in the "Pasts and Futures" unit offer their readers not so much a prediction of the future or an extrapolation of present trends as what Samuel Delany has called a "significant distortion of the present"? What is at stake in these significant distortions?

What do the writers (any combination of them) that we've read in the "Pasts and Futures" unit have to teach us about making and changing history? How can we use their fiction to help us clarify such historiographical issues as (choose one or come up with one of your own) whether history has a direction or shape or end; whether the future is predictable; whether ideas, 'great men,' civilizations, social forces, social movements, or something else entirely accounts for major historical shifts; whether objectivity is possible or desirable in the writing of history; the relation between histories and stories?

We often noted during the "Pasts and Futures" unit that those who write about the future often choose a particular past--Rome for Asimov, Japan for Gibson, China for McHugh--or a particular set of issues prominent in their presents--the fate of empires for Asimov, the cultures of technocapitalism for Gibson, the future of communism for McHugh--to use as a touchstone of sorts when crafting their speculative fictions. While brainstorming for this option, analyze the relations between past/present influences on the vision of the future in any novel or pair of novels from this unit, considering what they reveal about the writer's or writers' values and project. Then develop and support an argument about what is at stake in your writer's or writers' choices with respect to relationships between imagined past, lived present, and represented futurein their novel(s).

Asimov, Gibson, and McHugh make very different choices about both characterization and form in their novels in the "Pasts and Futures" unit. While brainstorming for this option, consider the strengths and weaknesses of the angles on the futures they have invented that their characters and narrative strategies provide their readers. In your paper, you must choose any pair of novels in order to develop and support an argument about what is at stake in their authors' choices with respect to characterization and form.